Kyrgyzstan

10/12/2013

WikiLeaks barged into offices all over Central Asia, pressuring independent journalists like these reporters at the highly-respected Asia Plus to instantly sign agreements on WikiLeaks' terms to publish US cables about their country.Here Marat Mamadshoev and a colleague are being told to sign the agreement immediately, but decline.

This is my quick take upon first view of this video (so sorry if there are mistakes or names missing, they will be fixed). It's available for rent ($2.99) or pay $7.00 plus on Vimeo. Naturally, I'm unhappy that I had to give a dime to WL, which I oppose on principle -- and I have to wonder how it is that Paypal could agree to accept these payments when it has blocked payments directly from WikiLeaks (and I plan to raise this issue with both Vimeo and PayPal).

This piece of vile stuff is supposed to be Assange's attempt to provide an "antidote" to a movie about him coming out in theaters October 18 which he doesn't like called The Fifth Estate (it's too critical) which he trying to kill off in various ways.

Perhaps he's counting on the fact that most people don't know anything about Central Asia, and will merely be impressed that he and his merry band of hacksters caroming around the perilous but picturesque mountain roads of Central Asia -- complete with Soviet-style policeman stopping and searching traffic, tunnels under repair until who knows when, and lots of sheep blocking the road -- are the coolest of cypherphunk hipsters going on a " journalism" trip through dangerous territory.

So an unintended bonus is that with Wahlstrom narrating most of the film -- when the Great One Himself isn't butting in and pontificating -- is that WikiLeaks cannot claim anymore that Shamir and Son don't have anything to do with them and don't represent them. They most surely do, as this film proves.

Johannes is a Russian speaker because he likely grew up in Russia or at least speaking Russian with his father -- who has played a sordid role in the Snowden affair, too, about which you can read on my other blog, Minding Russia. But he and the other handlers or minders or whoever the hell they are really have no sense of this region, whatever their Russian language ability, and burst in aggressively -- and disgustingly -- to try to strong-arm local news media in dire straits in Central Asia, where there is a huge list of murdered, jailed, disappeared and beaten journalists, into publishing WikiLeaks cables.

Another bonus is that one of the Russian-speaking journalists on the tour admits openly that he fabricated stories at his job (supposedly because he felt himself to be pressured to do so by his bosses and their need to sell newspapers) and then was ultimately fired. This is just about the level of journalistic quality we can expect throughout this film.

(The reason I mixed up Wahlstrom and this Russian in an earlier version of this blog, since corrected is because both are accused of fabrications; the Russian admits it in the film, Wahlstrom denies it. And while some WikiLeaks operative @Troushers is accusing me of "lying" here in my summary of the dialogue of this Russian journalist, I stand by it -- indeed he openly admits he fabricated letters and indeed the implication is that he was pressured by his boss, who needed to sell papers even if he didn't say literally that phrase -- Internet kids are so literalist. The obvious reality is, the theme throughout the entire film is that editors and journalists in mainstream media only do things to sell newspapers -- i.e. the obvious point of the snarky portrayal of Bill Keller and Sulzberger talking about traffic for a column of Bill's "half supportive" of Obama. Here's the script verbatim from Dmitry Velikovsky, from Russkiy Reporter, who has been active in covering Manning's trial in the past. Russkiy Reporter also sponsored the showing of the film in Moscow.

Velikovsky: I began with some funny study. I was obliged to edit the column "letters of readers". But the problem was that there were absolutely no letters to edit. But the column should be published twice a day. And so I was obliged to to invent those letters me myself. And I just invented a lot of them.

Wahlstrom: did you get some, any letters at all from real readers?

Velikovsky: Yes we got some maybe three, four or five in two months but they were all containing some critics.

Wahlstrom: but these letters you didn't publish.

Velikovsky: I wanted to publish those letters in the factual content of the newspaper because I found it rather important to have some kind of self criticism. But our marketing department had no self criticism and they forbid me to publish it. So i invented letters about problems of veterans, problems of pensioners, problems of no matter whom. So that's how I became a journalist.

Cue tinkly music...

Astoundingly, this aggressive, beligerent crew have no sense of themselves in this film, so imbued are they with their self-righteousness, even as they beam in Julian Assange on Skype who instructs the locals how they are to treat this material.

It's very clear WikiLeaks has absolutely no interest in the substance of the local stories, they just want to collect partners -- or conversely, shame those potential partners who refuse to deal with them for various reasons by making them look like they are boot-licking lackeys of the United States.

They tape phone conversations with people that are rather sensitive -- like a journalist in danger discussing whether he should publish a story about somebody who wants to run a coup in Tajikistan (!) -- and we have no idea if the people involved were informed that these calls would be taped -- and included in the film.

The single most damaging aspect I've seen in this agitprop trash is that the utterly unsupported claim is made that the local press are paid by the US Embassy to print flattering things about the US in order to get the leaders and publics of these countries to bend over while the US uses them as a launching pad and staging area for their war in Afghanistan.

The WikiLeaks people are too ignorant and blinded by their anti-American ideology to understand that a) the US has no need for this because these countries have cooperated anyway b) these tyrants have their own interests in playing off the US against Russia and China c) it doesn't matter as the US is pulling out of Afghanistan next year anyway.

Now, I write as someone who for six years worked at EurasiaNet and Open Society Foundation and wrote critically about the US role in Central Asia, particularly about the severe human rights and humanitarian issues -- about which the US government was oftne silent -- and the issues around the Northern Distribution Network, the supply path to Afghanistan from Russia which enabled the US to bring non-lethal cargo to NATO troops.

I also worked in the past as a free-lancer for RFE/RL ("(Un)Civil Society" and "Media Matters") and never experienced any censorship -- I wrote and published directly to the site. I recall only instances when care was taken in covering mass demonstrations once in Ukraine to make sure that the article didn't incite people -- as RFE/RL has a history of being charged with causing uprisings, i.e. in the Hungarian revolution and invasion by Soviet troops. RFE/RL is funded by Congress, but it doesn't have overlords hanging over you as you write -- there is far more independent coverage there than anything you'd see at RT.com, the Kremlin-sponsored propaganda outlet or Al Jazeera.

I have no relationship whatsoever to the US government, so I am certainly qualified to say that this film is an unfair hatchet job on people in harm's way -- oh, so typical of WikiLeaks.

The film opens with the WikiLeaks crew rolling through the mountains with Mehrabanb Fazrollah of Pyandj, Tajikistan, born 18 October 1962, in the back seat of the car telling his story. He was held five years in Guantanamo about which you can read some here.

Through a series of astoundingly leading questions, broad innuendos or outright promptings, the WL gang incites Fazrollah into saying he really knew nothing of any military significance, and his jailing was all for nothing, and boy is he mad. I don't know anything of his case except what I've read in the papers, but the duplicitious smiles and repeating of what foreigners want to hear are very old stories to me from having traveled in this region (I haven't ever been in Tajikistan but I've spent years travelling to Russia and other countries and interviewing Tajiks outside of Tajikistan).

Assange claims bitterly that this poor fellow spent five years ""to find out about a couple of fucking refugees in Tajikistan".

Actually, that's not even what the cable said or even what the man in the film says. They said there were 100,000 refugees. This is relevant of course regarding the Northern Alliance and the Tajiks in Afghanistan. The fellow is charged with membership in the Islamic Movement of Tajikistan (IMT) allied with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a group on the American list of terrorist organizations.

Sorry, but this is not nothing, these are real terrorism movements, even if supposedly in decline (like, you know, Al Shabaab was in decline and chased out of their stronghold when they hit Westgate Mall in Kenya?)

You would never know from Assange's sneers that this is a country that was in a civil war for years, that it had the highest number of journalists murdered -- some 50, nearly as many as Algeria, also in a civil war at the time, that these journalists were killed by Islamists because they were secular or visa versa because they were not approved Muslims killed by state security. The war is a complicated one but to pretend that terrorism and war isn't a factor here -- right next to Afghanistan -- is absurd.

This is of course the game, too, of the International Relations Realist school in Washington and elsewhere, who minimize terrorism and laugh it away as a fantasy of Pentagon planners. But the reality is that both are true -- real terrorist acts have occurred here and there are in fact real Islamists pressuring secular society including press, and there are also fake terrorists that the oppressive government thinks up to keep itself in power. And you know something? I surely do not trust Julian Assange and his crew of losers to tell the difference.

I will never forget in my life the terrified face of a Tajik journalist who had been receiving death threats that I helped rescue from Tajikistan in the 1990s -- and it was a brave man going the extra mile inside the US Embassy actually that got him and his family out of there.

In the film, after reading some cables on Gitmo -- and as I said, the cases may be innocent, but the WL goons are hardly the judge, and there are real complex problems of terrorism and pressure on secularism in these countries -- Assange and Wahlstrom sit and guffaw about a line in a memo they've found about Bildt getting in touch with Karl Rove instead of really trying to understand the complexities of the region They find this such a smoking gun and so "evil" that they roar for minutes, but we don't get the joke.

The translator asks outrageously leading questions and they all laughed and carried on and made it clear they sympathized with the Tajik taken from the battlefield from Gitmo and don't interview him impartially or critically at all. In the same way the pick up a memo from someone named Michael Owens, and start roaring about the US "empire of the 21st century" -- which is of course a rather lack-luster claim these days -- some empire of the 21st century which they are just now leaving, eh?

Then they read from cables -- only partially -- with a "scene-setter" -- talking about how the Tajiks have "unfailingly" allowed their overflights, which is all they really wanted from them. They then purport to read from a cable implying that these "imperialist Americans" in Dushanbe want to "make the local media more pro-American" and will first plant positive stories in the Russian media, then pay the local media to reprint them in the local press.

They don't actually cite from any document or give any source, and it isn't in any known cable from the WikiLeaks Cablegate already published that the US Embassy engages in this practice.

So without anything to bolster this claim, WikiLeaks smears gazeta.ru, Interfax, and Ekho Moskvy, claiming that they've somehow engaged in this practice.

It really is an outright lie. I have read the Russian-language press in this region for years. They are critical of the US and there aren't these glowing planted pieces they imagine. And the US doesn't need to engage in such a silly, crude practice.

Secondly, none of these papers in the region have very big readerships -- they don't have the capacity. We are talking about newspapers with 50,000 or 100,000 or 500,000 possibly at the most, but more at the low end. It's just not a way to reach people. Internet penetration is very low in some of the countries -- it's about 60% in Russia but drops down sharply as you go East.

The US already has Voice of America as an outlet to cover the perspectives of the US, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty which serves to enhance or enable struggling local media -- they have open partnerships with some local stations, and because they are far more independent than the official media of these authoritarian states, they have more credibility. To be sure, RFE/RL are not going to be radically antithetical to the foreign policy of the United States, any more than the BBC or Al Jazeera or RT.com. But unlike Al Jazeera and RT.com, RFE/RL really tries to cover critical local news without fear or favour, and proof of that is just how many journalists have been arrested, jailed or expelled over the decades. The US government doesn't need to crudely pay somebody to hide behind, in other words. But these, too, don't have a huge audience outside the intelligentsia in the big cities.

The fact is, WikiLeaks has not produced proof of this disreputable claim, because they've cited one cable only partially where it sounds like a proposal that one doesn't know was fulfilled, and in citing another cable, in Kyrgyzstan, it appears that the Kyrgyz foreign minister presents this idea, and that it doesn't come from the Americans.

To be sure, paid-for press and infomercials and advertorials are rampant in this region in the official and unofficial press. But to claim that these brave independent outlets take payments to portray te US nicely is just an outright smear for which there isn't an iota of proof. It puts these brave people in danger to suggest it.

This was the question addressed by Yulia Nikitina of MGIMO (the Moscow State Institute of International Relations) during her policy memo presentation and discussion at the annual two-day PONARS conference.

Because I asked it.

Her talk was actually about "How the CSTO Can (and Cannot) Help NATO" -- given the 2014 withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan. "Afghanistan is on its way to becoming a missed opportunity for NATO-CSTO cooperation," she said -- and she wasn't really delving into the nature of the CSTO per se and why NATO may not wish this cooperation.

But naturally, cooperation does hinge on the nature of the CSTO and its intentions.

Nikitina's talk came just as a summit of the CSTO was completed, and a statement was released that the security group did not plan to add more troops to Tajikistan, but planned to help Tajikistan "strengthen its border" in light of 2014.

To put this in perspective, think of 6,000 Russian troops already in Tajikistan, considerable wrangling still over how much Russia will pay Tajikistan for its base there and other arrangements, and a border more than 1,000 kilometers long.

The numbers of troops available in the CSTO -- which Uzbekistan has not joined -- is not officially released, but here's what Nikitina has to say:

In 2012, hard security issues disappeared from the agenda of potential CSTO-NATO cooperation. They were replaced by an emphasis on conflict resolution and crisis management, to which in 2013 peacekeeping was added. But what specifically can the CSTO offer in the fields of crisis management and peacekeeping?

The CSTO has four types of collective forces. These include two regional groups of military forces (Russia-Belarus and Russia-Armenia), prepared to react to external military aggression; a 4,000-strong Collective Rapid Deployment Force for Central Asia; a 20,000-strong Collective Rapid Reaction Force (both of which have been designed to react to crises short of interstate conflicts); and collective peacekeeping forces, including about 3,500 soldiers and military officers and more than 800 civilian police officers (exact figures for all types of forces are not publicly available).

So the last "collective peace-keeping forces" which isn't the same thing as the Collective Rapid Deployment Force, has 4,300 troops, but roughtly a fifth of them are civilian police officers. Interesting.

Basically, my question was this (with some explanation in parentheses):

In 2010, during the pogroms in southern Kyrgyzstan in Osh and Jalalabad, then-acting President Otunbayeva reportedly asked the CSTO to come in and help restore order. (At least 400 people were killed in these ethnic riots, thousands injured, and hundreds of thousands displaced, many temporarily to neighbouring Uzbekistan.)

All along before then, the CSTO said they were not designed to handle internal unrest, and that was not their purpose, but they were asked anyway, and we know there were emergency meetings about this question in Kyrgyzstan.

I had understood from talking to some diplomats that Uzbekistan opposed having the CSTO deployed in its "back yard" so to speak (as they disliked the encroachment of what they saw as a Russian-dominated entity - and that's why they refuse to join it - in a neighbour that already had several Russian bases and at that time the US base as well in Manas.)

So the CSTO was not deployed in Kyrgyzstan (and I could add that the effort to get some 50 police from the OSCE countries to deploy for "technical assistance" to the Kyrgyz authorities was also pretty much demolished because the all-powerful mayor of Osh did not want foreign meddling and Bishkek did not have control over him).

In any event, after these tragic events, this question was further discussed and in due course, you heard CSTO head Borduzhya and even Foreign Minister Lavrov speak of adding the competency to address mass unrest to the tasks of the CSTO.

Will they? I also asked if these troops could be deployed in Tajikistan, where an armed
group was involved in clashes with law enforcement in which 30 or more
were killed last year.

Likely there are others more knowledgeable about the details but I think it's good to ask Russians directly about this because they don't seem to want to define either what "extremism" is or what "unrest" is or anything about this.

Vladimir Putin also proposed using the CSTO forces in the capacity of peace-keeping forces.

This was first discussed after June 2010, during the period of inter-ethnic clashes in Kyrgyzstan, when CSTO forces could not interfere in the conflict due to the absence of legal mechanisms.

Of course, peace-keeping and unrest-stopping are really different things as the UN endlessly learns to its chagrin -- but I thought I'd ask.

That Izvestiya piece made it sound like it was a mere absence of legal mechanisms, although we knew it was both an absence of political will (on Russia's part) and an unwillingness to have deployment encroaching sovereignty on others' part.

In any event, Nikitina replied with that tone of prickly, moral-equivalency high dudgeon that seems to characterize so many interactions with the official Russian intelligentsia these days.

She said she often got this sort of question and "just couldn't understand it". After all, no one expected NATO to go to the south of France in 2005, she noted tartly. You can't just have military alliances going hither and yon, and so on.

It wasn't the sort of format where I could object that NATO wasn't invited to the south of France, and 400 people weren't killed in the south of France, and half a million didn't flee over the border, either.

In any event, she said she didn't know about Uzbekistan objecting, but in fact, she said, Belarus objected. (I had never heard that before).

Belarus said that it would be hard to tell the Kyrgyz and Uzbeks apart, Nikitina noted. I would like to think that what Belarus meant by this was not that "all Central Asians look alike" but that civilians and marauders would be hard to tell apart.

Of course, you could start just by separating, oh, the men riding around in police or army vehicles that mysteriously seemed to become available to them, wielding guns also mysteriously obtained, and stop them from going into places with women in scarves carrying young children and fleeing in panic. That should be fairly easy to "tell apart". In any event, urban hand-to-hand combat is a difficult setting and I'm not going to tell the military or police their business. I really don't know if Russian-led troops swooping into Osh might have made a difference -- especially if they didn't have a robust Chapter 7 equivalent sort of mandate to actually battle the pogromshchiki. I can't imagine that the attitude toward Russian-led forces would be intrinsically welcoming, either, although Otunbayeva, herself educated in Moscow, reportedly did ask.

In any event, I also asked Nikitina if 4000 troops was enough to do the job. She didn't answer. The thrust of what she replied -- and I await the videotape -- was that while response to disorders and/or extremist attacks was now in the remit of the CSTO, it was mainly about inter-state interactions.

She also stressed that the involvement of the CSTO in a domestic matter could only be at the invitation of the country itself.

I do think we are not back to a Warsaw Pact type of situation where the need to protect peace-loving fraternal socialist peoples serve as an excuse to do something like invade Czechoslovakia.

Of course, what we don't know is what would happen if there was a situation such as has occurred in Kyrgyzstan, where mobs end up toppling corrupt governments, sometimes it seems with some very skilled help (those sharpshooters you can see in some videos skilfully hiding behind trees and moving to scale fences didn't get those bazookas out of a tulip bed).

i.e. if Russian special forces stealthily took down a government, mixing in with mobs, and then whistled for the CSTO to put down any one objecting.

Or a scenario like in Moscow itself in August 1991, where one government leader is spirited far away and kept under house arrest, and an illegitimate coup plotters' committee appears, and then another government leader comes on tanks and defeats the coup plot but deposes the leader taken into exile. See, any one of those figures could be whistling for a CSTO. Then what? Which are the fraternal peace-loving peoples?

Nikitina seemed to indicate that invitations for such deployment might only be a remote possibility.

There are other troubles -- Uzbekistan isn't in the CSTO, and Nazarbayev, head of Kazakhstan didn't come to the summit, even though he wasn't sick and ended up having meetings at home and then going to Monaco. Monaco?! What's that about? "I could have come and chatted with all of you about what we're going to do when hordes of terrorists come pouring over the Afghan border into our countries and destabilize us in 2014, but instead, I chose to go speak to the Prince."

Says Izvestiya:

President Nazarbayev’s presence was important; after all the foundation for the military component of the CSTO is the Collective Rapid Reaction Forces (CRRF). These are the divisions that will actively participate in various operations. For now, the lion’s share of the CRRF are made up of Russian and Kazakh soldiers.

All of this requires further watching and research. Where have there been Russian "peace-keepers"? Well, in Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia.

How would the CSTO peace-keep? Like ECOWAS or the African Union?

Thinking of all the cases of violent unrest in Central Asia in the last 20 years, Andijan stands out as the worst or among the worst -- and Uzbekistan is not part of the reaction force or the peace-keeping force (I'd love to know more about how they differ). Kyrgyzstan is part of the CSTO, but there is already this precedent where it wasn't deployed because of objections and difficulties.

05/05/2013

Why does the Russia media print stuff like this speculating that the US is about to go to war with Kyrgyzstan?!

If you ever wonder why Eurasian exchange students and new immigrants in America acquire the views they do, ponder the media they read all their lives, were satured with, and still read and believe -- it's filled with deliberate lies and tendentious bullshit endlessly inciting hatred and suspicion.

The Kremlin is the worst of the provocateurs in this business, and the old Soviet disinformation and "agents of influence" apparatus was never dismantled. (Yes, the Daily Mail with its fake story about Saudi reports of involvement in the Boston bombing is right up there with the disinformation, but in their case, it's about sensations to sell newspapers; in the Kremlin's case, it's a state policy to lie and distract.)

The way these pieces always work there is "plausible deniability" because the Russian outlet is always citing an "expert" from one of the many state-sponsored think-tanks, or even a "Western expert" from among their likeminded networks, or even "sources" close to the government.

Today, the Russian wire service regnum.ru, which seldom departs from the official Moscow line, has a story with the headline "Plane Crash: US May Declare Kyrgyzstan as 'Outlaw' and Bring in Forces: Opinion," citing Kirill Stepanyuk, a commentator from comment.kg

Washington may declare Kyrgyzstan a country of a unrestrained terrorism and introduce US troops into the republic. We cannot forget that for the USA, Central Asia is a strategically important region and now there is the urgent issue of the withdrawl from Kyrgyzstan of the American military base, the same base from which the plane that crashed took off.

The Times published a picture of the crash site yesterday and quoted US officials as saying the reason for the crash and the status of the five crew members was still not known.

The Times cited an eyewitness who said that local authorities blocked off the site:

The news agency cited a local official, Daniyar Zhanykulov, a deputy
head of a Kyrgyz political party, who said that the open parachute was
on the ground near the site, but that police officers and firefighters
found no sign of the crew.

“It’s a horror, what’s happening,” Mr. Zhanykulov said, according to the
report. “There are no signs of people. The prosecutor and police
blocked off the area. And the rubble of the plane is burning. This is a
mountain area, and fire trucks cannot work.”

But according to the Russian "specialist" at comment.kg it was all different:

Really, in the first minutes after the plane crash, there was contradictory information with regard to the fact that at the site of the crash of the fuel plane, neither brigades from the Emergency Ministry nor police and even ambulances were allowed near the sight. Supposedly the territory was surrounded by American military." Whether that was true or not will hardly be able to be established since practically immediately followed a rebuttal of this information. If you reason logically, the Americans learned about trouble on board the fuel plane immediately and after they got an SOS signal likely sent their military people to the fallen liner.

Of course, it's possible US troops got to a plane that had just taken off from their base a few minutes earlier than local first-responders but I think more than just the American side of this story has to be questioned.

This crash follows a crash in Afghanistan in which 7 people on board a plane were killed after taking off from Bagram, and "no enemy activity" was reported in the area. Naturally, two planes like this crashing in the same week seems like sabotage, and yet, given the rush with which the US is trying to get troops out of Afghanistan and all the ensuing difficulties, fatigue and nerves and the negligence that comes with them could also be part of the background to these accidents. Or they could just be accidents.

I don't recall an American military plane ever crashing before in Kyrgyzstan, given the probably thousands of flights that have come out of that based during the Afghan war. Kyrgyzstan is like other post-Soviet countries with quite a few plane crashes in its record, but this was a plane piloted by Americans from their base, presumably.

This Russian story is not above trying to fan the flames of in fact non-existent ethnic hatred toward Kyrgyz, merely because the Boston bombers happen to have been born in Kyrgyzstan, as Chechens in the diaspora, although they left more than 10 years ago. Kyrgyzstan appears to have little to do with the Tsarnaev family, other than the fact that Tamerlan Tsarnaev managed to hang on to a Kyrgyz passport and use it to travel to Dagestan undetected supposedly even by Dagestani officials - a story that I think needs more research and more explanation -- and those implying that questions and criticisms here are about the Kyrgyz ethnos should knock it off, as it's about the Kyrgyz government, often pressured by Russia, and that's about something different.

As eyewitnesses describe, the fuel plane began to disintegrate in mid-air and exploded at a height of about two kilomters. Kowing that the USA will contrive to draw some advantage even from terrorist attacks, even in this story some underwater rocks may suddenly appear. Not so long ago, after the explosions in Boston, in the USA the question began to be hyped at length athat the death-dealing "pressure cookers" were prepared by natives of Kyrgyzstan, the brothers Tsarnaev."

This is fake, as there isn't a single news story in the American press, even in tabloids that sensationalized the story like the Daily News, claiming these were "Kyrgyz" -- it was always explained even for the geography-challenged American public that these were Chechens who happened to be born in Kyrgyzstan and left. Kyrgyzstan has as much to do with this story as the Seven Eleven chain store where the bombing suspects bought their Doritos and Red Bull, breakfast of champions.

Stepanyuk went on to say that the Americans "most likely will not miss a chance" to claim that a missile downed the plane (although there is no such claim) and that they are "capable" of even "sacrificing a plane" for this purpose (and of course the people on it, which of course is an outrageous implication).

"Washington may declare Kyrgyzstan an outlaw country of unbridled terrorist and introduce their forces into the republic."

American troops are there already on the base, of course, but there's absolutely nothing like that implied by US officials or even intimated by the big critics of the US involvement in this region.

EurasiaNet is back to putting falcons on the front page in a week of plane crashes and suspects in the Boston bombing tied to this region, they've either run out of copy or they've decided that this sort of "costumes and colourful objects" folk approach to the region is just the sort of "human interest" their readers are looking for -- presumably because they don't get enough of it from National Geographic.

Oh, there might be another wave of pogroms as there was in Osh in Kyrgyzstan in June 2010 where hundreds of people were killed, mainly Uzbeks, and thousands displaced, but it might be in some other setting, not Kyrgyzstan's south, but who knows, maybe Tajikistan, as police shoot-outs of suspected terrorists have occurred regularly there since the civil war was over.

Or there might be another massacre of workers as there were in Zhanaozen, Kazakhstan in 2011, but probably not that again, and not there.

That's just it -- whenever unrest does break out, whether in Andijan in 2005 in Uzbekistan, where hundreds were massacred or in Osh as I mentioned in 2010, the authorities make sure it is tamped down very well after that, making numerous arrests, silencing or jailing journalists and bloggers and citizen reporters. So that's that, we get it.

Except, we don't. Because unrest does occur, sometimes with large numbers of people, and it surprises those who aren't prepared. Like the overthrow of Bakiyev in Kyrgyzstan in 2012, which shows signs of Russian engineering, but which couldn't have succeeded if there hadn't been underlying social disatisfaction with energy price hikes (induced by Russia) and other deeper and long-term economic and social malaise.

Nobody was ready when 20,000 or even 60,000 people came out on the main squares of Moscow and other Russian cities after Putin's orchestrated re-election, and nobody who got enthusiastic about the prospects then was ready for the severity of the crackdown that is now inevitably coming.

So yeah, unrest, but they tamp it down but then, they don't. So you have to be ready, and you have to have some theory about how society changes in these countries -- and that would not be "due to Internet penetration" or "development of the middle class" -- the mantras rehearsed by State Department officials and pundits worldwide. If only Internet saturation reaches X point that it reached in, oh, Iran or Azerbaijan (where unrest is reaching the thousands now in demonstration), why we might see those droids we're looking for.

So last week, we were told at the OSCE Internet 2013 conference by Milli, the former political prisoner and blogger who just served 15 days in jail for his chronicling of demonstrations over the death of a soldier in the army, that there are one million sign-ups on Facebook. That's a lot of people for this small country. Socialbakers, the industry source on Facebook sign-ups, says there are more than a million now.

Says Socialbakers:

Our social networking statistics show that Facebook penetration in Azerbaijan
is 12.20% compared to the
country's population and 23.97% in relation
to number of Internet users. The total number of FB users in Azerbaijan
is reaching 1013080 and grew by more than
147280 in the last 6 months

Internet penetration was reported as 44% in 2010 by the ITU; then it was reported last year as 68% and is growing. So it's a lot, and people who say that Azeris are scared off the Internet by oppression were wrong, but people who say that such large percentages of Internet penetration will lead to revolution are also wrong, as the authorities are still very skillful in picking out people to coopt, intimidate or jail and torture as needed to keep the peace -- especially for those Western oil and gas companies coming in to develop the Shah Deniz II fields.

The number of people on the square in Azerbaijan isn't one million and isn't 28,000 but more like 2,000 or 200 sometimes, depending on the topic.

Now, Central Asia is much, much more "backward" or behind when it comes to the Internet, let alone Facebook, and has not had the kind of "Youtube protests" about local official corruption that then leads to street demonstrations -- although the phenomenon still can be found here and there even in these countries.

So you have to be ready, as these things can jump the synapse -- significant unrest/revolution/unheavals in Azerbaijan would obviously affect other neighbouring countries and so on.

Even so, we're been getting for years now articles that tell us not to worry, everything is boringly stable in Central Asia, and implying that anyone who crafts any other scenario is just hopelessly mired in Twitter mania and Jeff Jarvis-style over-romanticization of social media's power (that would not be me) or just not "getting it" about the Arab Spring, which didn't turn out to be "all that" in the end as we well know (and this article, Aftermath of a Revolution, in the International Herald Tribune really sums it up well).

Kendzior doesn't link to her colleague but should have, as he put down the markers for the prediction businesss, and I couldn't disagree, although as I said, you really need to have better theories of change and a more hopeful expectation about the people in these countries and their need to have a better life than they do under their current dictatorships.

I could answer Kendzior in detail but then, I already have in the past, and did on another article exactly a year ago by another specialist, Scott, Radnitz, Waiting for Spring, who told us "not to hold our breaths" and compare Central Asia to the Arab Spring -- and it's a good thing we didn't, as we'd be as blue as a UN peacekeeper's helmet now.

Even so, I'll just cut and paste below the fold what I put in the comments to Radnitz's peace again, because it still applies. And keep in mind that what the Arab Spring had was Al Jazeera (not WikiLeaks or Anonymous, silly, that's just self-serving hacker twaddle). Central Asia doesn't have that; it has Russian TV. So, you get what you get, even if you add Facebook.

I have known and worked with Vitaly for years, and he is one of the most solid and dedicated researchers on human rights and humanitarian issues for Central Asia. Memorial Society is the leading Russian human rights organization devoted to keeping the memory of the victims of the crimes of Stalin and also preventing and responding to their legacy, the human rights violations of today under the Putin regime. Russians tend to be preoccupied with the human rights problems in their own country, of which there are no shortage, but it has been the hallmark of Memorial that they try to care about what is happening outside of Moscow, especially in places where the Russian government can be part of the problem.

Ponomaryov was particularly noted recently in 2010 when he did difficult, in-depth and dangerous reporting about the pogroms in the south of Kyrgyzstan.

Ponomaryov is a modest fellow who will not go around trying to get press attention, so it's up to his friends to spread the word and speak to their governments and ask them to intercede with Uzbek and Russian authorities so that they investigate these threats. These incidents are in a context of increasing threats to Russian human rights defenders such as Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch in Moscow and takes place in a climate of crackdown by both Russian and Uzbek authorities on human rights groups.

I saw Sanjar Umarov, the former Uzbek political prisoner, instantly responded on Twitter when he heard the news and linked to BBC Uzbek Service which carried a report.

Investigate threats against Memorial Central Asia staff

The Norwegian Helsinki Committee
was distressed to learn of serious, anonymous threats made against the
Central Asia Program
Director of Human Rights Center Memorial,
Vitaliy Ponomarev, on 12 January 2012 and urges Russian and Uzbekistani
authorities
to open an investigation.

Mr. Ponomarev is a prominent human rights
defender and researcher based in Moscow, who has led Memorial’s
important work in
Central Asia since 1999. On 12 January, he
received several e-mails from different internet addresses, containing
disturbing
death threats against himself and members
of his family.

While the threats were made anonymously, they
were sent from the same IP-address, found to be located in Tashkent,
Uzbekistan.
The emails themselves were made to appear
to be from ethnic Uzbeks residing in the south of Kyrgyzstan. However,
Memorial
reported that linguistic analysis
indicates the use of an Uzbek dialect used in Tashkent rather than in
Kyrgyzstan.

Human Rights Center Memorial has reported
the threats to the Federal Security Service of Russia (FSB) and the
Prosecutor General’s
office, requesting that an investigation
into the threats be carried out.

- Unfortunately, threats against human
rights defenders have become commonplace in the CIS. The reason for such
threats can
often be hard to pinpoint, said Secretary
General of the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, Bjørn Engesland. - In Mr.
Ponomarev’s
case, the threats would seem to come from
persons who are concerned at the unusually high quality of his work to
expose human
rights violations.

Here's an interview in English with Ponomaryov by the NewsBriefing Central Asia, which explains an important thesis: that the thousands of people the Uzbek authorities have arrested and tortured on vague grounds of "religious extremism" in fact leads to instability, not stability.

03/01/2012

Traditionally, it seems to be important for the leader of Kyrgyzstan to get along with Russia -- for lots of reasons.

The new president of Kyrgyzstan, Almazbek Atambayev, has already gotten himself into trouble at home both for insufficient regard of the national hero Manas (calling him curiously "an ethnic Rossiyanin, i.e. from the territory of Russia) and refusing to meet with an Uzbek astronaut and even blaming him for the violence in Osh -- which seemed not only excessively nationalistic on his part but unjust.

But it's not as if he's going to keep Russia happy, the way he's talking.

Registan (Joshua Foust) may have this all wrong -- because he belongs to the school of thought that always understates Russia in Central Asia and sees it as a weak and vacilating power that isn't a threat.

Atambayev, however, is a friend of Russia. And Russia likes making noise about the U.S. presence at Manas. Russia, however, also likes keeping the U.S. nearby so it can absorb any negative spillover from the war in Afghanistan. A full American withdrawal worries Moscow as much as it worries Afghanistan.

I'm not so sure he's such a big friend of Russia -- and there are signs that Kyrgyzstan remains unstable and who knows how long he will last.

And this idea of "America as security umbrella for Russia" is nuts of course, for a number of reasons, including the fact that Russia just blocked the US in its efforts to convert the war in Afghanistan into a joint anti-narcotics war with Central Asian governments and the Kremlin.I really this is a very, very entrenched "received wisdom" idea that "the Russians like the Americans in Manas because they "take the heat" (and of course pay Russia for fuel. But it's worth disloding from the received-wisdom slot because it could change.

I don't see why you can't take Atambayev at his word -- read his interview, and he says he doesn't mind having Manas serve as a civilian airport through with military freight passes, but doesn't want it to be "an American air base". This might be a distinction without a difference, but it probably means less personnel -- and command and control issues.

He also is extremely blunt about not wanting the Russian base, and finding it merely a Russian general's vanity project.

For some reason, Joshua Kucera seemed to think that the Russians only agreed to finally pay this $15 million because they "got something" out of it.

I think it probably worked somewhat differently -- they didn't pay it because...they can. Do what they want, I mean. They have Bishkek over a barrel, they weren't happy with Bakiyiev and strung him along and put pressure on him and didn't pay the rent...Otunbayeva was an interrim leader so they didn't really have to deal...now they are assured that Atambayev will cooperate with them so they said they'd pay. In 10 days. Let's see if they do. '

02/28/2012

Almazbek Atambayev has stepped into a scandal, EurasiaNet's David Trilling tells us today, at the unveiling in Moscow of a new statute for the epic Kyrgyz hero Manas (for whom the base where the US military is now located is named).

But Trilling doesn't quite get all the nuances from the original Russian texts (he's just learning Russian).

The story was troublesome enough, but if regnum.ru reported Atambayev accurately, he didn't say that Manas was "ethnically Russian" in the sense this is conveyed in English, i.e. someone of actual Russian ethnicity. If he said that in Russian, he would have said "etnicheskiy russkiy".

But that's not what he said. He said "ethically Russian" in the sense of *Russian Federation,* i.e. the country that is on the territory of what is now Russia today. That word is different -- Rossiyanin. This is a word that Russians began to use in Russian some time after Russia, too, gained its independence from the Soviet Union and the "Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic" became the Russian Federation, and the citizens, who are all different ethnic groups, not only ethnic Russians, became Rossiyane, also translated as "Russians" in English for lack of a more precise term.

To be sure, "ethnic Russian" in that sense sounds as odd as "ethnic American" would sound. America is made up of people of many different ethnicities.

Here's what Trilling wrote:

First, during the unveiling of a statue for Kyrgyz mythic hero Manas in Moscow on February 24, which Atambayev personally helped finance, the president said that Manas, in whatever distant past he inhabited, was “an ethnic Russian” because he and the ancestors of the Kyrgyz both originated in Siberia.

"It is no accident that we are opening this monument to Manas the Great in the capital of Russia," said A. Atambayev. "Russia, Altay, this is the small homeland of Manas, where the great Manas was born and where he spent his childhood. Our remote ancestors lived for a long time on the broad territory of Western Siberia. The peoples of Kyrgyzstan and Russia are connected by a common history. Manas is an ethnic Rossiyanin!"

The Epic of Manas (Kyrgyz: Манас дастаны, Turkish: Manas Destanı) is a traditional epic poem claimed by the Kyrgyz people dating to the 18th century, though it is possibly much older. In some earlier versions, however, Manas is identified as Nogay. This opens the possibility of Manas having spoken a dialect of Turki similar to that of the Kazakhs and Nogay people today.

Then the story underwent changes:

Changes were made in the delivery and textual representation of Manas in the 1920s and 1930s to represent the creation of the Kyrgyz nationality, particularly the replacement of the tribal background of Manas. In the 19th century versions, Manas is the leader of the Nogay people, while in versions dating after 1920, Manas is a Kyrgyz and a leader of the Kyrgyz.

Attempts have been made to connect modern Kyrgyz with the Yenisei Kirghiz, today claimed by Kyrgyzstan to be the ancestors of modern Kyrgyz. Kazakh ethnographer and historian Shokan Shinghisuly Walikhanuli was unable to find evidence of folk-memory during his extended research in 19th-century Kyrgyzstan (then part of the expanding Russian empire) nor has any been found since.

Toktayim Umetalieva, described by Trilling as a "firebrand" uses the term etnicheskiy russkiyhere on 24.kg -- and perhaps that's what riled her even more? She believes the president's speech-writers should be fired.

Umetalieva doesn't seem to mind that a statue was put up in Moscow, nor does she seem to be advocating a version of the Manas story that disavows the connection to what is now Russia, but she wants to get it exactly right:

Atambayev did not have the right in a moment to change the history of two peoples. You must speak carefully and correctly about historical issues. The [presidential] protocol service should explain to the president what "ethnic affiliation" means and who Rossiyane are. We all are entitled to make mistakes but not the head of state. Perhaps the peoples of the Russian Federation and the Kyrgyz Republic have common roots, but their historical paths are different. Now the people of our republic are confused, and Almazbek Atambayev should explain himself to them.

I'll say. This fellow, dressed in the garb of the ancient epic hero Manas, reminiscent of a falconer, expresses a conservative -- even fundamentalist -- Muslim imperative to have the Westernized women of Kyrgyzstan take off their mini-skirts and makeup and clothe themselves more modestly and behave more traditionally in keeping with what are purported to be their ancient traditions.

Nate's the best writer at EurasiaNet because he actually reports -- he goes out and talks to people and gets all the texture and nuances and fascinating details that you could ask for.

But while he somewhat anticipates for us the harshness of the video to come by deploying words like "hector" and "provocative," nothing prepares us for the scenes of traditionally-clad man behind a podium, like a cross between a preacher and a Communist Party apparatchik, declaming loudly and fiercely, and holding up a book and at one point even cracking a whip.

Ouch. I'd like a second opinion about all this. Schenkkan interviews Bermet Imanalieva , editor of the culture website Limon.kg, his chief source for this story, but she is completely uncritical of (and rather enraptured by) this conservative singer, warbling that he is "unique" and "topical":

“Our country loves opposition, people who stand against something,” said Imanalieva. “Some may criticize him, but the common people understand and respect him.”

There is something to that love of the underdog in these parts, but I wonder if the take on the "common people" is entirely accurate.

Why couldn't a modern woman in a short skirt have been interviewed for this piece? Imanalieva strikes me as a fan, and rather uncritical of the genre Schenkkan describes here:

The dominant message in his songs, he says, is spiritual. An adherent of the Muslim revivalist movement Tablighi Jamaat, he has gone on seven proselytizing missions. Based on his interpretation of Islam, Ulan takes positions many regard as reactionary and misogynistic. He is passionately in favor of headscarves for women, a highly sensitive issue in contemporary Kyrgyzstan. In the video for "Ne Kerek," Ulan holds up two female dolls, one wearing a hijab, the other a miniskirt and tank-top, and says: "One Kyrgyz girl guards the honor of the Kyrgyz / One Kyrgyz girl brings shame to our people."

In another early song, the Russian-language “Brother Muslims," he denounces “the pervert Europe” that “defends the rights of sexual minorities/increasing the mass of abnormal communities.”

Whew. How much of a following does this "absolutely original" fellow actually have? I would love to know. And is it that "many regard"...or "which in fact is..."? Why the reticence? Yes, yes, I realize we can never judge in EurasiaNet circles...

Instead, in this sort of "enemy of my enemy is my friend," the "progressives" tend to work overtime to be sensitive, nuanced, ambivalent, balanced. The style is gingerly, but then at times lurches to frank admiration for the sheer exoticism and "otherness" of it all.

But... is this what urban professional women in Bishkek, or for that matter, peasant women in the provinces, really want in their lives? And if they do, are they willing to use sanctions and even force on those who don't?

I recall a Kyrgyz diplomat at the UN some years ago when Kyrgyzstan first became independent, who proudly pointed out to me his wife in a short skirt, and pointed to his own glass of wine at a reception -- he was proud that he had the freedom to be modern and Westernized, and yet also spoke of his country's traditions appreciatively as well. Countless times Kyrgyz women and their Western feminist interpreters (and this is why I want to ask about this) have told us that with Kyrgyzstan's nomadic past, women were more equal to men than in other parts of the world with other lifestyles, because they shared in the work. Be that as it may, competing traditions from neighbours and Soviet secularism are all at play here, and I don't know what the result is.

Ne Kerek, Tata Ulan's fire-and-brimstone song, has more than 20,000 viewers. Do they like what they hear? What's their feeling about it? (The comments in Russian, at least, all seem to be a nasty squabble about whether the Kyrgyz "stole" songs from the Uzbeks.)

Schenkkan describes Tata Ulan's elaborate pose of always appearing in his ancient mask, ostensibly so he won't become recognizable and praise won't go to his head. The loveable hectorer then admits that the mask shtick is a bit of a PR gimmick -- yet we wonder if maybe he's just insecure about his acne scars (which Schenkkan references).

The rather didactic purpose of a lot of the "costumes and colourful objects" pieces at EurasiaNet seems to be to guide us to "appreciation" of non-Western cultures and the traditions of a country where we have an American base (for a lot of people, now the word "Manas" is associated with the base, not the name of the epic hero). And all that's good as far as it goes.

But why can't something like this be debated? It's possible to appreciate the textured nuances *and* debate. After all, Ulan believers fervently in his own right to debate Western culture -- strenuously. Reading along about his past, I couldn't help thinking that the motivation for his particular brand of Kyrgyz nationalism is rooted in the fact that as a young child, Russian was his first language in this Sovietized country and he was also educated in Moscow at a theatrical institute. That background and that evident humiliation and sense of inferiority regarding one's own heritage no doubt impelled this particular hero to become more nationalist than thou as a result. Does everybody feel this way?

As for women's rights, the picture is decidedly mixed in Kyrgyzstan, although it is still much better than neighbouring Central Asian countries. Stories of bride kidnappings surface now and then. A PBS story quotes a man discussing his kidnapped bride calmly when queried by a reporter: "We're happy," he says. "Keep visiting and we'll be happier."

Another video documentary by the Brooklyn-based independent media company VICE features that same deliberate ambiguity about the practice of bride kidnapping that Schenkkan displays with this piece about this authoritarian bard/rap singer (and see the Facebook comments for more of that American liberal defensiveness). Schenkkan meets Ulan and describes him as "innovative" and speaks of his "insistence on addressing sensitive issues" rather than characterizing him in any way as a reactionary -- as he might if he were covering Rick Santorum or Rush Limbaugh. The attractive exoticism of the other!

Ever the careful journalist -- and he really is good -- Schenkkan refrains from judgement and cautiously frames his subject:

He is now a fierce advocate of the language. "If you grew up in the city and don't speak Kyrgyz, you're a myrk," he says in "Ne Kerek," inverting the insult native Bishkek residents use for non-Russian speakers who move to the city. It is statements like this that prompt accusations of nationalism.

Accusations? Or accurate descriptions?

A good journalist lets the reader decide for himself -- and I have. Nonetheless, I'd like to hear from Kyrgyz women before I accept this final statement from Nate:

For now, the question is whether Tata Ulan and those like him – pious and taking pride in Kyrgyz culture – will be able to find common ground with the rest of the country.

That sounds like "the rest of the country" may not be ready for Ulan, even if they admire dissidents of this sort (who aren't going to be tolerant of dissent if they get into power). The one million plus Uzbeks in the south probably aren't terribly thrilled with this particular manifestation of nationalism, although it may not be the worst.

I remember an Ingush woman with whom I used to work on documenting the terrible atrocities of the second Chechen war. There came a time when some of the Chechen rebels began to become more fundamentalist and began to go around demanding that women don headscarves and stay out of public places -- which had not been their custom.

"Well, now, isn't this a matter of culture?" I asked hesitantly, ever the good Western liberal.

"It's not culture. It's absence of culture," my friend said, capturing the coercion involved in this imposition of a code on conduct and dress on women.

People with cultures broken by Russian imperialist aggression in these countries -- imperialism that neither the Western left nor the elite national intelligentsia ever want to call out -- understandably reach for their own heritages.

I see nothing wrong with challenging their selectivity and coercion in doing so, and asking whether it is culture, or absence of culture.

I saw the same story floating around Kyrgyz news sites and gave it a pass on my roundups.

Why? Because the Kyrgyz sources said that that the man was under medical supervision. There was concern that his unexpected and uncharacteristically erratic behaviour could have been the result of a stroke or a heart attack or something.

It just didn't make sense -- nothing Kyrgyzstan has been doing with the World Bank is so terrible -- at least, no more terrible than Uzbekistan, where the World Bank gives money supposedly to help agricultural reforms that really don't seem to reach farmers, who then resort to forced child labour, for example.

Yet EurasiaNet can't resist exploiting a story like this to take a swipe at Kyrgyzstan and the World Bank:

While the reasons for Kramer’s outburst remain unclear, it is not difficult to imagine an international donor having a fit of outrage in Kyrgyzstan, a country notorious for inefficiency, poor policymaking and corruption.

Yeah, we get all that, but World Bank staffers don't throw glasses at people and storm out of meetings even if privately they are unhappy. It doesn't fit.

Yes, I watched the video and it strengthened the sense that this could not possibly have been deliberate. Also, from the video it doesn't seem as if Kramer "hurled a glass" as Trilling says, quoting 24,kg, but just knocked over stuff.

There's Kramer, talking calmly and boringly as people do at these kind of meetings, not raising his voice, when suddenly, he gets up and knocks things over. He whirls around strangely, as a woman fends him off, knocking more things over, but then carefully turns back and picks up his folder.

If he were having a stroke or some kind of "hypertonic crisis" how was he able to so methodically pick up his folder -- returning to the desk to pick it up after his outburst -- and go and carefully pick up his coat from the coat rack? That seems odd, but it might be what happens when someone has an attack and is trying to recover by doing routine things.

The other people at the meeting continued the meeting as if nothing had happened, although heads were turned, so it is not likely that he said something that was so dramatic -- it was only his erratic jump and knocking things over and hurrying from the room. 24.kg said he had in fact expressed the willingness of the Bank to work with the government of Kyrgyzstan.

Andrew Kramer, head of the World bank office, who spoke first, noted the readiness of his organization to provide support to Kyrgyzstan, after which somebody called him on his mobile phone. After listening to the caller, Kremer suddenly shouted something loudly, threw down his headphones for simultaneous interpretation in the direction of the deputy prime minister, breaking a glass that had been standing on the table, and quickly gathering up his things, ran from the meeting room.

Knews.kg added that his colleagues had told reporters that Kramer had an "attack" and that his driver drove him home.

The point is, his colleagues have said he had some kind of "attack," he was taken to the hospital as the newscaster clearly says on the video and 24.kg also reiterated, so...why are we claiming that he's denounced Kyrgyz corruption?

Yes, we all wish the World Bank did more of that, but exploiting this odd incident to make that point really seems off base. Maybe he did have a stroke. Or maybe some bad news on the phone that upset him?

Why does this kind of blog post get done at EurasiaNet? Because there's annoyance in this quarter that the US government has made something of a poster boy of Kyrgyzstan as the democracy model for Central Asia, and the country with the highest level of freedom (press freedom and freedom for NGOs, not perfect, are surely higher than its neighbours).

And there's the US base in Manas, of course. And that means that "progressives" have to knock Kyrgyzstan in compensation, as a kind of corrective to what they see as over-indulgence by the US and possible evil military narratives in play and exploitation of local people. Yet once you crank the dial to go on this radio channel, everything you listen to fits that paradigm -- and maybe you just can't perceive something as what it is.

No Kyrgyz news sites seem to have anything more on that -- if it was the denunciation of the "corrupt Kygyz government" intended, we surely would have.

01/07/2012

I'm dismayed to discover there isn't yet a statement on Zhanaozen from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. There is no formal statement from one of the mandates like extrajudicial executions (i.e. killings by police of demonstrators); nothing from the High Commissioner herself.

I don't see evident that they really have been. There isn't an investigation underway yet, and that needs to be pointed out.

What has happened is a deputy of the high commissioner has visited Kazakhstan and expressed "warm regards" from being allowed in for talks, not an investigation. In these talks, some discussion was had about having the experts coming in, i.e. special rapporteurs or independent investigators with mandates on topics like torture and extrajudicial executions and such who investigate killings such as these.

The rather calcultated and manipulated "invitation" enabled the official press and even many independent outlets to say that "experts were invited" and made it appear as if the UN was "on the case" -- but it isn't, at least yet. To be sure, it's the holidays; to be sure, the UN capacity is stretched thin (i.e. the torture rapporteur just went to Kyrgyzstan -- there are many other situations consuming UN attention like Syria and Yemen).

But, you know how it is at the UN -- if it were happening in Israel, there'd be a dozen people speaking out on it and commissions and committees formed in a heartbeat. And there isn't, for Kazakhstan.

On December 28, the opposition newspaper Respublika has come to grips with this and researched it -- they've made the excellent point that an actual invitation for a UN rapporteur to visit would have to come in a diplomatic note from the Kazakh Foreign Ministry to the UN offices in Genera -- and that hasn't happened. Instead, the Interior Minister has said he has invited UN experts -- although he's not the one formally who should do this -- and with each passing day, he could be wiping out clues and silencing witnesses and victims because they aren't really coming -- yet -- even as he looks good for seeming to be willing to share information with them.

Kazakhstan is taking steps to ensure complete and objective investigation into all circumstances of the December 16 mass disturbances in Zhanaozen, and also considers the possibility of inviting independent foreign experts to join the process

I hope they do come, but I see a lot of manipulation here. Countries can gain a lot of credit merely for meeting with UN bureaucrats and seeming to make invitations that they don't have happen (Kyrgyzstan took an awfully long time to schedule the visit of rapporteur Juan Mendez, formerly of Human Rights Watch).

The headlines are wrong; the MFA didn't invite the experts -- not yet. They are considering doing this. Those saying that whatever the responsibility for authorities for striking workers and the shootings in Zhanaozen, the authorities are at least handling the investigation correctly are misled - the authorities are stalling.